Search Marketing Blog
(Lack of) Speed Kills
Posted by Sean McMahon on 03.02.2009
An article published today by the British hosting company, UKFast, reaffirmed what we have known here in the States for some time now . . . the ability to improve Web site user satisfaction is directly related to the length of time it takes for your pages to load when retrieved through a search engine listing. The article, titled ‘Google Warns of 20 Per Cent Drop in Traffic’, points-out that the leading search engine in the world has performed internal studies that have revealed up to a twenty percent (20%) drop in traffic at sites with pages that load half a second slower than another site.
This article also reiterates that the time it takes for your pages to load can directly impact the Google Quality Score associated with your AdWords campaign, as we first reported in a blog post back in May 2008. In this post, we convey that your Quality Score is a rating generated by Google that influences the positioning of your AdWords listings, and specific minimum bid prices for relevant keywords.
As identified in the UK Fast article, your Paid Search listings in Google are impacted by the load time of your PPC landing pages, which means that you may have a higher cost-per-click than your competitor, even though your listing is ranked below them. Google has determined through their research that a mere half-a-second greatly diminishes user satisfaction and decreases click-through traffic by twenty percent, which is why load time is now a critical component of Quality Score.
The article went on to claim that Amazon.com produced similar results pertaining to customer experience and load time. In A/B tests, the online retailer delayed page load time in increments of 100 milliseconds, and found that even very small delays resulted in substantial and costly drops in revenue.
